Adam Lenhardt
Senior HTF Member
From Morgan Freeman's Revelations Entertainment and creator/executive producer Barbara Hall ("Homeland", "Northern Exposure", "Judging Amy", "Joan of Arcadia") comes this companion series to "The Good Wife" about Elizabeth Faulkner McCord, a former CIA analyst plucked from obscurity to be Secretary of State after the serving Secretary of State's untimely passing.The show balances three main storylines: her home life with her husband and two youngest children, the day-to-day work of running the State Department and being the nation's top diplomat, and a conspiracy surrounding the circumstances of the previous Secretary of State's demise.Téa Leoni is very winning in the title role, as an idealized version of Hillary Rodham Clinton stripped of the Clinton political baggage and Hillary's political ambitions. She is firm, at times very aggressive, but still likable. The supporting cast is also strong, led by Tim Daly as her very sharp husband, Bebe Neuwirth as her discontented chief of staff (a holdover from her predecessor) and Željko Ivanek as the president's chief of staff and her primary antagonist. Keith Carradine, recurring as the President of the United States and McCord's former boss at the CIA, brings a inscrutable air to his role. We know McCord trusts and respects him, but we're not sure that we do.Barbara Hall is one of those writers that I really enjoy. "Joan of Arcadia" was a show I absolutely loved, and her time showrunning "Judging Amy" and her tenure on "Homeland" demonstrated that she has the ability to write political figures and international politics, respectively.This isn't a show that's going to reinvent the wheel; it's firmly in CBS's procedural wheelhouse. But it is one of the stronger pilots I've seen in a while, a show that in its first episode already has a strong sense of its identity.Unless it really tanks in future episodes, I'm along for the ride.